#sonet

Original (volgare toscano):

Le favole, compar, ch'om dice tante, Son ver per cert' e nessun le contenda: Ch'anticamente fûr orchi e gigante E streghe, che andavan en tregenda.

E parlavan le bestie tutte quante Secondo Isòpo conta en so' leggenda; Ed ancor oggi viene 'l semegliante: E s' i' nol provo, vo' che l'om me penda.

Ser Lici è orco e mangia li garzone, E 'l Muscia strega, ch'è fatto, d'om, gatta, E va di notte e poppa le persone.

Guglielmo de Bediera è per ragione Gigante, che n'è nata la sua schiatta; Ser Benecasa parla, ed è montone.

And here's my translation:

The tales/fables, pal, that men tell a lot,

Are surely true and no one can contend:

That in ancient times there were ogres and giants

And witches, that went to sabbaths

And all beasts talked

As Aesop tells in his legend

And still today similar things happen

And if I don't prove it, may I be hanged.

Sir Lici is an ogre and eats boys,

And Muscia is a witch, and turns, from man to cat,

And goes out at night and sucks off people.

Guglielmo de Bediera is for good reason

Giant, for thus his family was born;

Sir Benecasa talks, and is a ram.

And now for some more notes: the Granfione uses the term "favola", fable, since a distinction between them and fairy tales hadn't yet been made, and are to this day often used interchangebly. With the mention of child-eating ogres, great giants and night-wandering witches, he is referring to folk tales, while with the talking animals he directly references Aesop's famous fables.

Now he turns to taking jabs at his contemporaries from Siena, all except for one completely unknown to us (which takes away from the poem's strength but anyway). Calling Sir Licci an ogre for eating boys seems to be referring to him going after young men (and with a certain voracity it would seem). Muscia get's also accused of sodomy, though he's a different case: for him, we might know who it actually is, the senese poet Nicola Muscia da Siena, who wrote three poems, one mocking the failed pilgrimage of Guido Cavalcanti, and two "dreams" (nice scenarios imagined for a loved one) about a certain Lano (perhaps Lano da Siena, whom Dante meets in the 13th canto of the Inferno?). The "turning into a cat" is also a pun: we know from Franco Sacchetti's "Trecentonovelle" (from the 187th novella) that in Tuscany, "Muscia" was a dialectal term meaning "kitty". Calling Guglielmo de Bediera a giant could be a jab at his (actually diminutive) size. Finally sir Benecasa seems to have un unfaithful spouse, as he's called a ram (-> "cornuto"/horned->a cuckold)

Funny how we have gotten a fairy tale parody centuries before the main written-down fairy tale texts.

For the notes I relied on Mario Marti's "Poeti giocosi del tempo di Dante" (playful poets from Dante's time), the articles from the Treccani "Dizionario biografico degli italiani" (biographical dictionary of italians), and also some from Giovanni Dall'Orto's blog on gay history and culture (here)